


Looking out for people

by Zauzat



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 23:16:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zauzat/pseuds/Zauzat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post ""The Reichenbach Fall": Lestrade has a bit of a thing about looking out for people</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking out for people

**Author's Note:**

> This story rather reflects my own glum mood, sorry about that.

Lestrade had a bit of a thing about looking out for people. In the playground he'd been the one who'd called out the bully, even when the boy was bigger than he was. As a teenager he'd been the one to turn on gangs of youths filling up bus shelters while intimidated older women stood miserably in the rain. These actions hadn't always turned out well for him but it had never stopped him doing it again the next time. It wasn't really surprising that he'd become a copper.

Standing in the ruins of the implosion of the life of Sherlock Holmes, he found himself doing it once again. Lestrade was the one that helped Mrs Hudson pack up Sherlock's things when John refused to go back into the flat. Now he had tea with her twice a month and listened quietly as she complained yet again about not being able to find a tenant because all the enquiries were from journalists or Sherlock-haters or rabid fans.

He found himself keeping an eye on John too, calling in favours to find him a bedsit in London he could afford so he didn't have to face up to a new flatmate. Going out with him for a beer once a week, just to make sure the man did something - anything - other than go to his job and go home alone. Getting that gun of his off him - he'd told John it was just temporary but he wasn't giving it back until the man stopped looking like a shell-shocked ghost.

He tried to look out for Molly, remembering her desperate crush on Sherlock. But that didn't work so well, she blushed and stammered every time she saw him and never quite looked him in the eye. There was definitely something wrong there but he couldn't quite work out what.

Letting his inherent decency bury his bitterness, he found himself fighting to protect Sally's career too. If she hadn't been quite so shrill about how Sherlock must be the criminal mastermind behind it all, she'd have taken less of blame when it became clear that the cases Sherlock had worked on were all sound and the internal investigation was a waste of time and resources. The thing was he could understand why Sherlock had rubbed her up so badly and he knew a good detective had to consider all the angles, however unpalatable. He didn't want her to end up in traffic, although he was quietly glad to have her off his team, having found her a place in narcotics.

He'd even had a go at comforting Mycroft, having finally got the story out of John, or at least the story as John understood it. He'd enjoyed watching the Holmes men irritate each other rather than everyone else, it gave the rest of the world a chance to catch their collective breath. He'd tried to tell Mycroft that he understood what it was like to get so sucked into an interrogation, so convinced that you had to find the truth and you were almost _almost_ there, that you lost sight of what you were giving up in return. He'd tried to tell Mycroft that he knew what it was like to live with mistakes you could never ever undo. He'd got no more than a glass of whisky and a stiff nod for his trouble but at least he'd tried.

The oddest moment of all of it when he found himself comforting Kitty Riley. Moriarty might be able to open a prison, a vault and the Tower of London simultaneously but he'd done it the old fashioned way, with treachery rather than magical technology. Similarly he might have been able to make Jim Moriarty disappear and Richard Brook seem to have existed all along, but in the same old fashioned way, digital information left traces. Mycroft's people had refound the life of Moriarty and disproved the existence of Richard Brook fairly speedily.

Oddly enough it was the _Daily Mail_ that had taken up the campaign to resurrect Sherlock's reputation, seeing a marvellous opportunity to stand up for the posh boy who'd been _doing something_ about the criminal element, criticise the police and get one up over the _Sun_ , all at the same time. It was when Kitty, while being interrogated by Lestrade, realised just how badly she'd been taken in by a killer that he'd found himself with a shirtfront full of sobbing woman, patting awkwardly at her shoulder and wondering if her mascara would ruin his last clean white shirt.

He'd been only too glad to get back to the blessed peace of his flat that night, a flat empty of everyone else's pain and trauma. It had hit him when he opened the fridge, though, and looked into cavernous emptiness to find a packet of stale cheese crackers and a half-eaten tub of yoghurt ten days past its use-by date. He'd used to have a wife to look out for him. Not any more, though. And yes, maybe he hadn't really heard her when she'd complained that she spent all her time looking out for him and he spent all his time looking out for everyone else and where did that leave her? In the arms of another man, apparently.

But now Lestrade thought he understood her point of view a little better. The trouble with coming home to a flat empty of everyone else's grief was that in the echoing silence there was no avoiding his own. As he slumped in front of the telly and wondered whether to play it safe yet again with Indian take-away or go wild with Chinese, he couldn't help but wish that someone was looking out for him.


End file.
